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Mortgages, Looking To the Future

According to Business Insider, buying a selling a house will be your most expensive financial transaction that you will do in your life. Along with is, buying your house will be the biggest purchase you will make in your life and will probably be where most of your net worth is housed (get it). So in light of this, home ownership and knowledge that surrounds it should be at the top of the list among people, but surprisingly (or unsurprisingly) it’s not. Home ownership continues to be elusive to the average person and like all other areas of finance its shrouded in misinformation and flat out bad a damaging information. Society seems to remember best the major negative moments of a particular topic and throw out all of the good things associated with it, and the mortgage industry is a prime example of this. This can be referred to as, “throwing the baby out with the bath water”, and what is happening is because one brief time in history where there was a damaging moment (the 2008 crash), all the future actions and sentiments are viewed from that lens. People are always now “expecting the next crash”, not knowing that most, if not all the causes of the crash have either been outlawed or are no longer practiced by lenders anymore. But what is left over is the bad taste in everyone’s mouth, and when it comes to financial losses, people are hard to forget.

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My One Suggestion For Easier Finances

Continuing with my time at the bank, I learned of many tools, and products and services that I had no clue of before. Things like compound interest, interest rates, assets and liabilities, loans, and even tax returns, all of these things, and much more, I gained a deeper understanding, and still have a lot to learn. But if there was one financial tool that I can recommend everyone incorporate into their lives is something so simple that it doesn’t seem like a “tool”, and that’s budgeting. Budgeting is the one tool that can take your finances from shambles to meeting your goals in a relatively short amount of time. Just by simply actively writing down your expenses (what you spend your money on) and comparing that to your income (what you bring in), you can find where exactly is the reason why you don’t have the amount of money you think you should at the end of the month, and you would probably be surprised at the money you “find” (you usually find money in the form of the shock of how much you spend on things like eating out that you stop cold turkey). All in all, my time at the bank was a place where I did a lot of learning, and I realized that it is the small, consistent practices that make the biggest difference in your life over time.

Credit: southpointfinancial.com

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My Time As A Banker

Being a banker for almost four years, I have learned a lot about personal finance and personal decision making that I would argue is one of the toughest things to acquire on your own. Given this, I got to understand why people leave things like investing and money management to “the professionals”. One thing my former boss used to beat into our heads was to remember the days where we did not work at the bank and how little we knew and how that was the place where the average client coming in for service was in their financial knowledge. This I must say, was a very sobering thought because this meant that most people are operating off of very little financial knowledge and more than you would hope for in society are operating from misleading or outright wrong information. Another phenomenon that I saw was that most people get their information from people close to them like parents and friends, who themselves are operating from an incorrect view of finances. So the more I began to realize this, the more I tried to educate the people whom I would sit down and talk to, whether I was providing a service for them or they had come in for a new product or service. But even with my efforts, a lot of people either made excuses as to why they could not apply this practical information I was giving them, or how they felt that the way they were doing things was better than the suggestions that were being provided by me and the research backed suggestions the bank had given to us to provide to clients.

Credit: istockphoto.com

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Video Games, A Home Away From Home for a Young Me

My earliest memories of things I did for fun involve 2 things, toys, and video games. I was introduced to video games by my older brothers, who played video games before me and were the reasons they were in the house. As I grew older, I spent more and more time playing games, and eventually, they became my go-to for daily entertainment. Reflecting on my gaming over the years, I have come to realize that I have spent thousands of hours playing video games spanning the two decades that they have been in my life. Before online video games were popular, the games that caught my attention the most were those that had great stories and good gameplay. To me, video games were the modern-day stories, where through all of the ways they attracted those playing, from visuals to the sound and music, and everything in between, there was nothing that compared to the feeling of being challenged and overcoming the obstacles that the developers had put in front of you, all while enjoying a good story in the mix. Going back to how video games are modern stories, some might say that movies should be in the top spot in that category, but I believe story-driven video games have an edge over any movie that could come out. This is because when you read a book, you are actively using the acquired ability of learning how to read and comprehension as a tool belt to read and understand the book; also reading is active, meaning that you are in charge of the progress that is made throughout the story. This compares to video games in that when you pick up a new game, you have to use your learned ability of using the controls and comprehension of how games operate as the tool belt to actively get through the game, and you are in control of the pace as well. So when you had these tools at your disposal, similarly to how when you learn reading and comprehension, you could enter many new amazing places, and follow thoughtfully developed characters as they traversed worlds that were only constrained by the technological advancements of their time like the hardware of the game console and the amount of data they could pack into the game disc or cartridge (which looking back has created some pretty comical animation but was cutting edge at the time). So video games were my books, they were my home away from home that took me from where I was at the time, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and transported me alongside some of my favorite characters (at the expense of my homework a lot of the time) that I look back on with joy and still cherish their roles in my life to this day. This is my never-ending hobby, and even though I don't have much time nowadays to play for the extended amount of hours that I used to, every moment that I am able to sit down and have those controllers in my hands will transport me back in time to that feeling I had when I was a kid those many years ago.

Credit: en.wikipedia.com

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The Magical Super Bowl of 2008

Way back when I had more time on my hands, I was glued to the TV watching NFL Network pretty much any time it was my turn to watch TV, watching commentators discuss all things NFL, highlights of the weekly games played, and reruns of some of the greatest NFL games ever played. Nowadays I’d be lucky if I can catch a quarter of a game, and even more so if I can catch a full game. But back in 2007, I was able to watch my favorite team, the New York Giants, eke out a playoff appearance, and shortly after win a Super Bowl against the then-undefeated New England Patriots. Being massive underdogs, nobody except for Giants fans would have believed that they would have been able to pull out an upset victory, and many fans didn’t believe for that matter, but I did. Call it naivety, but I believed with every fiber of my being that the Giants could win that Super Bowl, even if nobody else believed so. This was due to 3 things, 1. I was a huge fan, 2. The great performance they had in the last game of the regular season against the Patriots, 3. The superstitious practice that I was sure was helping the team win. Being a huge fan goes without question why I had confidence in them. The second reason, the last game of the regular season which the Super Bowl was essentially a rematch of, was a game that I had believed changed the course of the Giants’ trajectory and gave them the confidence they needed to push through the playoffs and past the Patriots. It was one of the best regular-season games of the season, where there were a lot of points scored and the Patriots squeezed out a victory by a mere 3 points, which gave the Giants team the confidence that if they can get that close to beating the best NFL team in history, then they can beat any team, and when they met them again, they could win. In an article I found talking about that game called “Eight years ago, Giants stood toe-to-toe with unbeaten Patriots in epic regular-season finale and learned how to be Super”, Eli Manning, the then quarterback of the Giants said this about the game “I think, just going into the postseason, that game just gave you some confidence,” and Chris Snee, an offensive lineman said this “I remember thinking after the game … if we do see them again, I think we can beat them.”. This was the sentiment surrounding the team after the game, and you could feel it. Finally, and to me was the most important, was what I was contributing to the team by a routine that I had adopted as that would secure a Giants win every time. During halftime of every game during the playoffs and the Super Bowl, I had to use the bathroom and listen to the then-new album by Kanye West, Graduation. As long as I did this, I was sure to secure the victory for the Giants and indeed that was what happened! The game was an amazing game, where the highlight of the game was a play where Eli just barely got out of being sacked and launches a ball toward the middle of the field, where the receiver, David Tyree was there to bring down the catch with the ball pressed to his helmet, in magical fashion, which was a symbol of the season as a whole. I recall my brother coming home from work around halftime of the Super Bowl and right when halftime started I told him what I had to do and he looked at me a little funny, but he knew that it had to be done. Anything for the team to win.

Credit: bigblueview.com